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Time to defend the landlord and rental agent.

I am an active user of social media, as are many of you reading this article I would imagine. As time passes, I find that people are very quick to criticise something or someone, as they now have a much wider platform to do so. In the case of the someone. As that someone is not directly in front of them, they feel they have much more confidence to go to task and be much more aggressive and some comments are found to be inaccurate and in some cases, hurtful to another party.

Last night while viewing one of my social media groups. I found a person attacking rental agents and landlords for setting the price of rental properties in the market place. The attack was suggesting that rental agents and landlords are setting the price of rental properties to be so high, that many can’t afford the monthly rental payments.

To think that a rental agent has the power to set the current rental market value is ludicrous. The market value is exactly that, the market value. I never see posts on social media taking Apple or Samsung to task as the average phone is more than some people’s mortgage or rental payments. People pay this for a phone as this is the market price. If no one bought them, then the price would drop, when too many people buy them, the price goes up. This is a market value.

This is a biased article of course, as I am the director of a rental agency. As stated to many of my landlords when we meet them. Our job is very easy. We are marketers more than anything else. Our job is to find you good rental clients for your property. Over many years of working in the industry, we build up a list of clients, contacts, affiliates, marketing strategies and experience in order to complete this. If we could dictate what price a property was, then our job would be the easiest in the world. This is only the same as saying that we could dictate what price a property would sell for. If this was the case, there would be no recession or crisis.

Going back to the comment that was made on social media. The particular person stated that a landlord should not charge so much money for their property. This frustrates me slightly as no one seemed to be concerned about the landlord when the crisis and recession took place and rental prices were completely undervalued and property owners could not afford to pay their mortgages, local taxes, community fee’s, house insurance, as the monthly rental did not cover these costs. From this, owner lost their homes and life savings.

The reason I am saying this is because rental tenants do need to also look at the other side of the coin. As an example, if a property is renting for around €800 per month in the current rental market, I would not be far off by saying that the landlord’s outgoings are roughly as follows –

IBI – 70 euros per month

Basura – 10 euros per month

House Insurance – 50 euros per month

Mortgage – 500 euros per month

Community fee’s – 100 euros per month

Fiscal Tax (20 %) – 160 euros per month

This is without any maintenance repairs, fixing air conditioning, replacing appliances that costs hundreds of euros per year.

So, in essence and in most cases, the landlord is actually paying the rental tenant to stay there.

My point to this article is not to criticise anyone in anyway, but I do find people are quick to judge and comment instead of taking a step back and seeing everything from different angles.

When you have a problem next with your rental property or you see a property advertised at a certain price. Take a step back and just have a think of why that price structure has been set. The myth is that rental agents are taking huge commissions and over inflating rental property prices for their own gain which is not the truth I can assure you. If it was, I would have a Ferrari parked outside my office instead of a Nissan Qashqai.

Just think, if overseas landlords did not buy properties to rent them out, then there would be no properties to rent and a lack of rental properties will only mean one thing. Huge rental price increases due to the lack of demand.

It would be great to hear any comments that you have on this article.

Please remember that we are always here to help with any questions that you have.

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